Write More Productively (How to Start) | Tiago Forte | How I Write Podcast

The writing is just getting something down. The editing is where all the work comes in. What was your editing process like? I had a rule that I would not put anything in the book that had not been tested publicly. Way too risky. You got really into the Godfather. He got pages of the Godfather novel, pasted them on his own notebook, annotated, underlined progressive summarization to deconstruct that story into a film. That notebook was like his second [inaudible 00:00:24]. When I saw that, I was like [inaudible 00:00:25]. I think the ultimate endorsement of your work is that I did all the prep for this episode at the last minute this morning in about 45 minutes, and I feel like I'm the most prepared for a podcast I've ever been, and it's because of years of second brainage of saving things that you've texted me, things that you've emailed me, conversations we've had, Google Doc memos that you've written, and I was just able

to compile it all onto one easy sheet. And I just think it is like the ultimate testament to what a second brain does. I love it. I'm honored. Well, welcome. Thank you. I'm so excited for this. Good. Tell me the story about how you used to sit in the Barnes and Noble in Mission Viejo as a kid. Wow. Okay, yeah. We're going for it today, man. When I was younger, I would spend a lot of time at the library, the Laguna Niguel Public Library, but then I noticed it didn't have the most recent books. There was a few year long gap from when a book was published until it arrived, and I was really into things that were timely, business, technology, self-development and so I moved to the Barnes and Noble. I was just a fixture. It was actually not in Mission Viejo. It was in Aliso Viejo because I was walking distance from my high school, Aliso Niguel High School, shout out, and I would just camp in there for four,

five, six hours, like whole days. I would just go there sometimes on a Saturday in the morning and not leave till the evening, and I would just sit. Later on, they opened a cafe, a Starbucks, and then I finally had a chair to sit in, but before then, I would just sit on the floor in the middle of the aisle way just with a stack of books next to me just reading one after the other.

And you went back to that store when Building a Second Brain, the book came out, right? Yes. I felt like as you were writing Building a Second Brain, especially towards the end, that book almost broke you. Yes. Why? Yeah. I've written a long blog post about this. It's really hard to explain because it doesn't seem like this should be the case. I mean, what's the big deal? I'm just sitting at my little home office just typing. Why is this so confronting and difficult and torturous? I think this is the best way I have of explaining it is, you reach a point with a piece of writing the size of a book, that there's so much context to load up to even make one step. I mean, to write one sentence. You have to load up the structure of the book, what each chapter is trying to do, what the previous chapter just did, what the next chapter is trying to do. You have to load up all the comments from your editor and outside reviewers, all your own realizations and lessons. It's like a whole

brain's worth of context that you have to load up, which can take an hour or two, and then you write one paragraph and you're exhausted. And then you just do that day after day. But you ended up doing writing retreats too [inaudible 00:03:36].

I did three, four, or five day full writing retreats, which were crucial for that reason. So here's the other thing that happens is, if I had a morning call, it just killed me. Because let's say it's Monday morning, 9 A.M., no big deal, might even be a 30, 45 minute call, but I've now loaded up my brain with context that was not the book, which means that day is lost, which means on Thursday there's even more context to load up, and it's harder to remember because I have to remember it from 48 hours ago instead of 24 hours ago. So there's this exponential effect, this compounding, but it's like the bad kind of compounding of how much you're trying to remember.

How did you think about those writing retreats in order to make them productive? Were they fun or were they just terrible? Oh gosh, both. The fun part was it was the deepest flow I ever got into. In your life? In my life. Wow. In my life. I remember one day, after pretty much seven or eight hours straight, I didn't go to the bathroom because I was so deep in flow. I wasn't even aware of the need to go to the bathroom. I didn't eat anything. I think I hardly drank water. Imagine seven or eight hours in a row, and I got up from my table and it was like in a dream state. Everything was in slow motion. I just stumbled around my room, took a walk outside and I was like a child. Everything had this glowing, effervescent... It was one of the most psychedelic states of mine I've ever been in.

Wow. Where were you? I was at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey. Oh, that's bougie. That's very bougie for you. This is something I learned. That's off-brand. What explains this? So each retreat was very different. Secluded in, in the wine country and Temecula was the first one. Then the Ritz-Carlton on the water front in Marina del Rey, and then the third one was a beachfront condo in Malibu. And I found, it's better if it's expensive. The more money I spend the better, because then I'm accountable.

Tell me about your dad as a painter, what you learned from him. Yeah, so my dad, I think my dad is the model of an artist and of a creative and creator for me in

many ways. He's a painter. He does large-scale canvases or paper, everything from figures to still lives, to landscapes, to even abstract. Has been a painter his entire life, since he was five years old. He tells the story of being four or five years old doing finger painting, and he just pressed his fingers up the piece of paper or the canvas and then squeezed them between his fingers. And he said right in that moment, he knew he would be an artist his entire life.

Wow. Right there. Because it was just heaven for him. Mesmerizing. Mm-hmm. And he has been ever since then. Let's see. There's so many directions we can take this. Yeah. I think the main reason he's the model for me is that he was wildly imaginative, creative, the most creative person I know, but he also broke so many stereotypes of being an artist in that he was responsible, structured, strategic- Disciplined. ... intentional, disciplined. So those polarities, which I think people often assume can't coexist, do for him.

How did he keep that discipline? That's a good question. I think it's in his nature. It's in his nature. He's that way with everything. For him, discipline is not something taking away from his creativity. It's essential to it. There's one story he always told that's an illustration of this. At one point, he had the opportunity when I was a kid to buy the house next door, and it would've been so cheap, it would've been like a hundred thousand dollars. Today, that's probably worth at least 10 times that much, it's Southern California. And he always said that he should have done it. He should have bought it, from a financial point of view, but he is glad that he didn't because it would've been so much stress that he wouldn't be able to do his art. Essentially, he would always keep his life so simple, ordered, structured, disciplined, so that he had the peace of mind and the bandwidth to do art.

Remind me, did you enjoy these trips to the Los Angeles art museums on the weekends or were they a real slog and you're happy that you did them, in retrospect? Kind of a slog. Kind of a slog because we would do so Sundays were two things, church and then modern art museum. That was our ritual. And what's funny is... So my dad's kind of passion or one of his

trademarks is biblical art, Christian art. That's right. And our church, which was one of these evangelical mega churches in Orange County was full of his art. Every square inch of our church had his art, his biblical art everywhere, every wall. And so when I was a kid, I didn't know that there was a difference between church and a modern art museum, because they were the same. They were both these large modernist buildings where you would have this sense of transcendence and reverence for something bigger than yourself. Both were full of my dad's art, so it was almost like they were the same kind of environment.

It's funny because your dad produced so many works of art. He's sort of like Picasso in this way. He just makes and makes and makes art. I went back to the very first note that I have with your name in it from July 2017 and the first sentence and the first note reads,

"The first lesson is that quantity and quality are not opposing forces. You don't have to sacrifice one to get more or the other. One can be used to enhance the other, like two sides of a coin." Yes. One of the most powerful lessons that my dad ever taught me, which is again, completely the opposite of what most people think, and even most artists, how they work, it's a profound realization. Basically, what I would see my dad do is work on the quality side, try to make the most beautiful, I don't know, pineapple. Making the little crosshatch, how to make a good pineapple. But then when he would get stuck and you always eventually get stuck, instead of getting bogged down, being self-flagellating or criticizing himself, he would just switch modes. It's like a railroad. You hit that switch and you switch over to another track, which was the quantity track. So now what he's going to do is have paper and just make a hundred pineapples,

one after another, one after another, after another. He's basically training his hand right there in the moment, how to make a pineapple. Then he gets all that experience, all these a hundred pineapples, compresses or distills all of that knowledge, takes it back to the original painting, and now, just like that final Picasso drawing, can just make the perfect pineapple in one try. How does that idea show up in your writing? So for me, I just do the same thing. I just

don't bother getting bogged down in whatever you want to call it, writer's block or creative block. When I sense that I'm even starting to get stuck... That's the thing, you can switch tracks when you see far in the distance that you're going to get stuck. It's often the sensation of you're slowing down. The insights or the breakthroughs are starting to slow down, you're like, "Oh, I'm approaching a blockage point," right then, you can just switch to quantity. Learn something, compress a new idea, come back, and suddenly the breakthroughs come just as fast.

Was writing the book hard because you couldn't do that, or did you find a

way to do that while writing the book? I found ways to do it. I found ways to do it. One of them is just clearly Twitter, or now X. Any time I'd get stuck on the book, anytime on Twitter slash X that I was really prolific at tweeting it's because I was blocked on the book. It was like there was a rock in the roadway and I was just attacking it from all angles. How many different ways can I say this? Can I say it in an analytical way? Now, in an intuitive emotional way? Can I just try to go around it, not even address the roadblock? Can I go off on a side tangent and then come back almost like on a different path. I would just attack it from all angles, and sooner or later one of those angles would work, and then I would take that lesson, oftentimes, copying from social media, pasting directly to the book.

What was your editing process like for that book? The editing process was many, many, many passes. By you, by other people? I remember I reviewed an early copy, so there were a bunch of us that did reviews. I remember we all had our separate Google Docs. I remember reading through that, but one of the things that I remember talking about and that I remember feeling is, editing a book is harder than editing an article. Because I devoted every night for a week of my life to just working on that book, working on the book. I didn't even get through the whole book in the editing phase because the editing took so much time. I know.

And I feel like that's one of the harder parts of editing a book is, you probably get a disproportionate amount of feedback on the beginning versus the end. Yes. And it's also just hard to have people who can really invest. I mean, we were working together at the time, and even then it was hard for me to be like, "Okay, I need to devote 40 hours to this thing." It was massive. In many ways, the writing is just getting something down. The editing is where all the work comes in. It's just many passes, each pass, usually looking for just one thing. This is the crazy part. It's like, I would do a pass. I might read the whole say part one, which is four chapters, maybe 20,000 words, just having one filter. For example, is this two geeky, technical, computer sounding? That's the only thing I'm looking for.

That was a big thing that you were working on in your book was basically expanding the aperture of the kind of people that you could reach. Exactly. Because early Second Brain was much more technical, PKM nerds, and the explicit intent of this book was, let's go a little bit more mass market. Right? Exactly. That was the intent. So how'd you think through that? It was really just looking at every concept, sentence, even individual words and not even necessarily technical words. It's really interesting, the technology world, Silicon Valley has its own jargon completely, and you can just hear it. You say a lot of things like this. I say a lot of things. Anytime you say order of magnitude- We need to optimize for this. Yes. Overton window, leverage, that's the ocean we swim in. That's all Silicon Valley dialect. Normal people don't talk like that, and because they're not familiar with those words, it turns them off. I always thought about that, is, someone's

reading... Think about when you've abandoned a book. It might have just been one page that was bad or unclear or bombastic, or you got bored and you're out the escape hatch. And so I just looked at every sentence from the perspective of, does this attract them and pull them deeper in, or does it increase the odds that they're going to bolt? It's funny, I'm picking up the book now because... Here we go, page 54, how will you know your book? Do you know what I'm about to talk about? So page 54, you open up the capture section with this story of Taylor Swift, and that was one of the things that I remember talking about. How do you expand the stories so that they can resonate with

more people? I remember sending you this YouTube video about Taylor Swift and her creative process. That's right. And that shows up here. Yeah. In an interview about how she wrote the smash hit, Blank Space, she talks about how she's in this dresser and then she remembers this line, "because Darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream." And I remember texting that to you, and that was what was so much fun about reading this book is there's like 12 sections in here that either I texted you about, we had spoken about together, and I remember that was a big thing that we spoke about is finding stories that would appeal to the mass market and weren't like the principles of product development flow or whatever book [inaudible 00:16:32] about manufacturing.

Exactly. Yeah. It was a collaboration among me and you and so many other people. I mean, I had a [inaudible 00:16:43] mind, a whole legion of people sending me stories, ideas, little bits of feedback, little discoveries. I mean, really this book, it's like the accumulation and then distillation of many dozens of people and they're thinking and contributions.

You got really into the Godfather while writing that. Yeah. Why did I get so into the Godfather? It was Coppola's notebook, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a number of things that are quite interesting. I wasn't a Godfather fan. I never really saw the point. In fact, I'm still not really into the story itself. I'm only into the behind the scenes. It was the fact that he relied completely on this notebook. There's a wonderful quote. I couldn't believe... When you find these quotes that are just so perfect for what you're writing, he says, "I could have made the entire movie without a script as long as I had this notebook of mine." And that notebook was like his second brain.

Was his second brain, was his commonplace book. When I saw that I was like [inaudible 00:17:45]. I was doing a lot of Italian gestures because I was immersed in Godfather stuff. But I was just like, "Thank you Francis Ford Coppola." It's like a gift, just such a gift that he gave me. So what's the story there? He made this film, which is I think the second or third most successful film of all time financially, so that's kind of cool. Typically, you think of the script as the authority, as the backbone of the movie, but for him, even more important than the script was this notebook where he got pages of the Godfather novel, cut them out, pasted them on his own notebook, and then essentially annotated, underlined, added what I would call progressive summarization to deconstruct that story into a film.

What was interesting about the way that you researched that was, I remember you researching it, falling down the rabbit hole, but then you wrote about it on your site. You got it all out in a few thousand words, and then you distilled it again into the book, and you did all that while writing the book. So that process happened. You didn't just go from research to the book, you almost had to share it in public, watch the responses, then distill it again.

Yes, yes. That was essential. I had a rule that I would not put anything in the book that had not been tested publicly. It was too risky, it's way too risky, just like a startup would validate their product before pouring millions of dollars into developing a software program. I'm not going to print anything in a book that is going to be printed so many times, translated all around the world into so many different formats unless I not just think that it's good and compelling and useful, but that I know that it is because hundreds, if not thousands of people have said so reliably. And the only way that I know how to do that is through testing, either by publishing it on the blog, seeing what people think, tweeting it, teaching it live.

I love that. It has to be validated. Teaching it live. I mean, this is our common thread. This is really the best way of validating. Publishing content online is okay, but it's quite

slow. To finally publish a blog post and then even if you have comments, finally see those comments, the feedback loop is very slow, whereas teaching, especially live, but even on Zoom as we know, there's just nothing like it. You can say something and instantaneously... I always like to do gallery view where you see everyone's faces totally. You just see the ripple. There's like a flicker across people's faces, and right at that moment, I know that it landed and it hit, it resonated with them or it didn't. There's no form of feedback that I've ever encountered that is anywhere close to that fast. How were you using your teaching to get feedback?

Oh, yeah. It was everything from doing our famous debriefs, the whole team... This is one of the most critical parts of teaching online... sit down. What worked, what didn't. You need a team that gives you really brutal feedback. Sometimes you do think, "Oh, it kind of landed right," because it's like your favorite story, and they're like, "No." That flopped. Sometimes they saw things in the chat because you can't really have the chat open, it's too much information. So they are cross-referencing what you saw in the Zoom thumbnails to what they saw in the chat. They are even bringing their own experience. I really say those debriefs are the key learning moments where you're summarizing...

There's so much information generated during a cohort, so many things happening at the same time. Plus also, in other places, Slack or the online forum or the support tickets, there's even stuff coming in, so you're trying to distill all this stuff into lessons about how to improve. Yeah. I think that your story is a case study in how far you can go when one person that you admire believes in you, and I think the person who did that for you was Venkatesh Rao at Ribbon Farm.

Yes. I mean, there've been a few people over time. You were one of them. In fact, I always find that if you keep going and you really believe in what you're doing, and mostly just keep going, the right cheerleader or mentor or coach or believer eventually shows up. In the earliest days, I mean, I hadn't even taught the first cohort. I had just announced it. There was no marketing, there was no sales. It was just, "I'm doing this thing." And Venkatesh, who even at the time was quite an influential voice in Silicon Valley, he was sort of like an insider influential person, put it in his newsletter. He said, "This is Tiago. He knows what he's talking about. I highly recommend his course." And I just saw that and I just could not believe it. I could not believe that he would believe in me with so little evidence. It was huge. How have you built on his ideas?

If I had to say, it's a way of thinking. I mean, it's a lens on the world that is analytical, yes, but also so contrarian, always getting whatever the topic is, turning it completely inside out, upside down, and looking at it in a new way. And then I'd say the other thing that Venkatesh does that is so powerful is remove the moral framing of any subject. This is maybe in my top five or top three moves, intellectual moves that you can make in any situation to have insights. I can do

it in any situation, just ask, here's sort of how it works. What is the moral lens that I'm looking through? And there always is one. And when I say moral, it could be a religious morality, what is right and wrong, but it doesn't have to be. It can be something from the culture. This is good. That's bad. It can be something like status, low status, high status. Any of these sorts of basic framings that put reality into usually one of two buckets. It's black and white thinking. Because that is not correct. Reality does not come in two binary choices, and if you can find... That's the trick. Even finding the moral framing is difficult because it's a fish in water, it's so basic to your perception. But if you can see it... I just love that moment where you're like, "Gotcha," and then you can just get that filter and just rip it off. And that's what Venkatesh does in almost every piece of writing he does.

Tell me about the writer and residence project that you did there. I think that is some of your best writing. Productivity for Precious Snowflakes, The Holy Grail of Self-Improvement, The Throughput of Learning. That one is killer. Oh my gosh, yeah. I've forgotten about that. Gosh. I think that's the most generative time that I've ever seen you. Yeah, it was. It was. So, okay. Venkatesh Rao has a blog still to this day called Ribbon Farm, which I think is... Can I say this? At least in my experience, the most important and underrated piece of culture in the world, at least maybe the English-speaking world. I think that thing, it's like a treasure trove. It's just a goldmine of insights for those willing to do the work, and that's the hard part. I once joked on Twitter, slash, X that my whole business model is just going over to Ribbon Farm, finding a good idea, and then just explaining it more simply and

monetizing it. There's a lot of truth to that. But okay, so there's this blog. At the time, even today, it's not the biggest, there's not millions of people visiting this. It's insider, it's a niche. But in Silicon Valley, in the circles I was in, hugely influential. I mean, I would read it religiously, and then he invited me, I don't even really know why, to be a writer in residence, which involved writing five long form essays, and I think he paid me 500 bucks, a hundred dollars each. I spent... I was really into time tracking at the time... more than 50 hours on each of those, 50 hours, because I just saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime.

I almost thought, "If I had to do my life's work in a year, how would I do it?" Like I had to, gun to my head. If I had to predict, what would I work on the next 20, 30 years. If I had to guess and just project into the future, what would it be? And that's what I tried to do. And the amazing thing, it's been almost 10 years, it's been eight years since then. I've, until now, largely just been unpacking and unraveling those essays. It's interesting to see what you've gained in usefulness, but lost in a kind of frontier interestingness by trying to distill.

There is totally a trade-off. Yes. Such a steep trade-off, such a trade-off. Absolutely. I hope that's not a sword to the chest, but I think it's revealing. It is a sword to the chest. Every time I have to make the trade-off, it's painful. It's painful, but it has to be made, at least according to what I'm trying to accomplish. What is that idea that you have compression context? Every time you compress, you gain certain things, accessibility, understanding. You open doors to that idea, but you lose such beautiful things. You lose context, nuance, you lose subtlety, you lose depth.

What did James Mishner teach you about writing well? Oh my gosh. James Mishner. Gosh, these giants, they're such giants in my life that have impacted me so profoundly. He's my favorite, I'd say fiction writer, historical fiction. His method, what he does... I think he's passed away now, recently, in the last few years. In fact, this is another note to self, I need to study him, how he did this. He would basically go to a place, a country, a region, a city, and usually random or not the most popular ones, like Poland, not exactly the first country that comes to mind, South Africa, Alaska, Spain, Mexico. Well known, but a little bit off the beaten path places. Studied their history very, very deeply, almost become a scholar of that place. It's history, it's culture, religion, food. And then read a fictional story, but based very closely on real facts of a person, a family, a tribe from that place. And I would just read these books and get lost in the stories.

What about his writing style, his method shows up in your work? Wow, I've never thought about that. A couple of things come to mind. One is immersion. You have to immerse yourself. You have to be so willing to give up your own culture and point of view to the point that you just inhabit that people's reality. I mean, he would spend years, years studying these places, living there. He had whole teams of people that were studying the history of architecture in that place so that he could speak to it very precisely. I think immersion is one, and the other is, and I kind of hate to say this, but mixing fact and fiction. He just mixed them in a way that you're not supposed to do. When you have, say, formal education in writing, you're slotted pretty clearly into fiction, non-fiction. Well, you know how I feel about formal education.

That's true. Don't worry. You're preaching to the choir here. Very true, very true. It's just a complete mixing together of those things. That distinction is not important to him, which sounds sacrilegious. It's not important whether something is true or not, not for him because he has to have a fact, but then fill in the details with made-up stuff, and I do that in my writing. I mix what I know to be true, what can be documented and proven with what is conjecture and speculation. In what ways have you come to depend on your second brain less over time? That's an interesting question. I do depend on it less. In fact- I can sense that.

Yeah. I've been doing second brain stuff now for 10, 15 years, and there was really a phase, maybe a five, six, seven year phase that was the capture phase almost of my life. When I first started my career, moved to San Francisco, moved to Silicon Valley, I was just sucking in every idea from every source that I could, just spending all day reading and consuming things because I was forming my worldview. I was forming my mental models. These days, I can't do that. I don't want to do it, and it would actually be counterproductive because now I have so much. Once you have five, six, 7,000 notes, is one more note really going to make the difference? Come on here.

And I can see in my Evernote how many notes I have, and it's like 7,365, and I know each and every one was hand curated by me. They're not just random stuff that I've collected. When I see that, I'm just like, I need to just capitalize on the information and knowledge I already have. Explain it better, put it into new formats, translate it for more people, explore the implications more deeply rather than just find and accumulate more stuff.

Tell me about these book summaries that you write. You wrote an amazing one about the body keeps the

score. That is so good. You wrote another really good one, this was more of a series about the theory of constraints. But one of the things that you do is I think that you spend 10 to a hundred x more time distilling and trying to understand other people's ideas. Put them in your own words, organize them for yourself, reduce the excess that doesn't have to do with your work, your ideas. And I think that the thing that you taught me through progressive summarization is how much of a power law information is. If you read a book, the best one to five percent is so much more relevant than everything else, and you find that in your first pass. You make highlights, you go through the pass, you get it all there in a note, but you don't stop there. You then progressively summarize and you say, "Within all the best stuff that I've found, what is the very best?" And you keep going, you keep going, you keep going until eventually

you have a summary of the best parts of the book. And I think that part of the reason why you're so able to efficiently express your ideas is because you spend so much more time in the capture, organize, distill phase that most people just say, "Oh, I just read a book one time. That's it." Yeah. I really find that so important. It's almost like I'm trying to... In the flow of writing, I need to be able to reference an idea thoroughly, accurately, credibly, while still maintaining my train of thought. That's really hard to do. "Oh, I'm talking about one topic. Let me just pop over here and explain this other super complex topic in just three sentences." The only way that I know how to do that is to first summarize that other thing and a bunch of other things that are... I almost think of them as the margins, and then write the thing that I want to write by just linking out to the essentially supporting points. I learned that partly through Venkatesh who has a

whole thing about the power of the hyperlink, that the hyperlink is really what transformed online writing. Because for the first time, instead of having a sidebar or a footnote or an end note, you can link to another resource that is not limited in length, where that point or the proof of that assertion or the evidence to back up to that claim can be laid out in as much detail as you need. What summary are you most proud of? It's funny, I'm not proud of summaries.

That isn't the work, that's not the value really. Those summaries are just building blocks. It's like if someone was making a building, it's like laying the foundation. They wouldn't be proud of the foundation. That's not where the artistry is. That's not where they express their true vision, but you definitely need a foundation. That's how I see not just the summaries, but all this preparatory work, the highlighting and summarizing and distilling and getting

feedback. All that stuff is just preparation. Where does your interest in the Toyota production line and manufacturing show up in the way that you think of the creative process? Yeah. I have a whole corner of my intellectual life that has been on pause for some years now that has the theory of constraints, Toyota manufacturing, manufacturing in general, and really all process-oriented thinking. Actually, this is an example of removing the moral framing. So when you say manufacturing, most people, even if it's subconscious, automatic negative connotation. "Oh, manufacturing. That's the old world. That's the industrial world. It's dirty, it's dangerous. It's people who aren't very educated, not really fulfilling their potential."

We think of the industrial era, people in mines or on factory floors laboring away, which is a bias that is a moralistic bias of knowledge workers and office workers that we just have. And it's first of all, not accurate. Modern, high-tech manufacturing is the most advanced, clean... You need so much education. It's in some ways the most advanced part of our society. Think of microchips or electric vehicles or nuclear reactors. But this is so great. I love that it's a negative framing because that just means it's a gold mine. It's like this gold mine of insights and ideas and innovations and breakthroughs that all the other people out there aren't aware of and therefore don't make use of. So what specifically, if you pulled from it and brought into Second Brain... I think the other thing is manufacturing and creativity, those are totally the opposite. Exactly.

How could you ever manufacture creativity? You're trying to game the system, but you actually see them in a unified way. Totally. So this goes back to the quantity versus quality. Instead of quantity, quality, manufacturing, art, the way that I see them is totally complementary. That one leads to the other. We already talked about quality by

just generating a lot of quantity, but also vice versa. A lot of times you have to study a problem, very high quality, very subtly. Then you come up with a solution that allows you to produce a million units of something without any mistakes. It goes both directions. I think that was one takeaway is, I already knew that quantity and quality were synonymous, but I didn't have the backing. I didn't have the evidence, the data. I only had the anecdote of my father. But then I'm studying Toyota and they give me many, many decades of studies and flow chart diagrams and Gantt charts. All the evidence that I was seeking, they just supply it, and now I have essentially evidence for my pre-existing belief. One of the ways that writing shows up that I don't think would be obvious to the average person was, I remember the very first time I stayed at your place in Mexico City. You had your room and then you have a guest room, and I stayed

on this air mattress type thing, and the whole room was filled with your vision for the future, and you had written it out in extreme detail. Who do you want to be? How do you want to spend your days? All the way down to the quality of the light that you would see, and whether you were drinking morning coffee or tea after you woke up every morning. You have thought about your future, manifesting it, writing it, shaping it, crafting the narrative almost more than anyone I know.

It's funny, all that manifesting stuff, visioning, crafting your intention, manifesting your future, I'm sorry to say, it's true. Totally. This has almost become a moral framing. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as smart, intellectual, whatever, look at that part of the self-help world, which can be very mystical and not have very clear thinking and be a little hippie. Yes, all those things are true, but they're really onto something. They're really onto this idea that the greater the detail and the specificity and concreteness that you describe a future, there's just no way that that level of specificity isn't going to then feed back into your perception, your decision-making your daily choices all along the way. It's obvious if you think about it, in a sense. You are creating your life day by day. If you have a plan for that creation, it's not necessarily going to be exactly what you envision, but closer to it. In terms of your creative process and just the

life that you're trying to build as a creative, what are the things that matter to you the most? I once did an exercise to identify my top five values. What are they? Freedom, power, recognition, love, and impact. So I always have those in mind. I think that's very true. It's slow. It's as much a discovery and an emergence rather than just... I mean, you could sit down and just write down five things, but it has to emerge from very deep within you. What had you choose to write the PARA Method? So

you wrote Building a Second Brain, and then you came out with this, what, 12, 18 months later? Let's see, about 14 months later. Okay. How did you think about this book from a positioning perspective compared to your first one? It's smaller, different color, simpler, shorter. Why? Essentially, I don't know, six, seven, eight months after Building a Second Brain, I just saw that it could be much simpler. It could be much more distilled. It never ends.

It's truly endless. It really never, ever ends. I started seeing, honestly, the reception of Building a Second Brain, which to me, it was already so simplified, so accessible, and yet for so many people who aren't familiar with that way of thinking, who aren't tech-savvy, who aren't interested in technology, it was still way too complicated. And I realized, "Oh, I could just get one technique from Building a Second Brain, write a whole book just on that, and that would be the perfect stepping stone." And I have a feeling it's going to go further.

I could do a kid's version. I think the PARA Method could even be further distilled by writing for a fifth grade, sixth grade audience. Do you feel like the book cannibalized the course? Definitely did, definitely did. There's so many signs, so many anecdotes, comments, feedback. It's a double-edged sword because I'll often say, "The book is good enough." I learned everything, got all the value I needed from the book for $15. I did too good of a job on my book.

Yeah. And therefore, I'm not going to buy the $1,500 course, which always makes me feel great that I wrote that book. I've shared before, even publicly, course sales have basically plummeted since the book has come out, between 10 and 15% of what they used to be, like 80 to 90% decline. Wow. It's real. What's the lesson? Gosh, I feel like I would definitely do it again. If you're going to cannibalize your main product, you should at least do it with your next product, and I think a lot of the success of the book has been that... It's actually interesting. We've built up the Building a Second Brain aura and reputation and brand by charging a lot of money for the course. So then when the book came out, people felt like, and in some cases it's true, they were getting that value for 1% or less of the price, and that's one reason the book has done so well. I think if I could go back in time, the lesson might just be, be ready for that. I

thought it would happen, just not that fast, that a book would be such a direct substitute for especially a live course. We tell ourselves things like, "Oh, there's something ineffable and mysterious about being there in person, seeing the expressions," which is true, but not so true that someone's going to pay 100 times as much. Well, I think it's interesting because when we

met, you were a blogger and a course creator, and now you're an entrepreneur and an author. And a YouTuber. And a YouTuber. Why do you say that so passionately? Because those two things, author and YouTuber have become my official identity so fast, it's shocking. In no situation, in no venue do people mention the blog. The blog is... It's so far in the background. I don't even think of the blog anymore, which is crazy to me. Just a few years ago, the blog was the central facet of my life. Now it's like the R and D lab in the basement in the back room. Now if I'm introduced, it's always author and maybe YouTuber, because those are by far, by far, by far the most public, mainstream and legible. That's the key thing. Easy to understand. Course creator? What is that? Blogger? What is that? People know author and they know YouTuber.

How do you write differently for YouTube versus books? I haven't done most of the writing for YouTube. That has been Mark, who until recently was our general manager for YouTube. He did all the scripting. Just in the past month or two, I've started to do more of that. What always surprised me and surprises me about his writing is how fun he makes me sound. So lighthearted. An idea that I would've been like, "Okay, there's a five-part framework. Let me take you through the thing." He'll just be like, "Oh, yeah, just go through your emails one at a time." He just addressed in that little offhand comment, what I would've spent a thousand words trying to explain intellectually, and it's more effective.

It's so much more effective on YouTube. What do you think your biggest weakness is as a writer? Always approaching things from a primarily intellectual, analytical, heavy, overly thorough... This is why this whole process of distilling through these books and everything was hard. For some people, that's easy and fun. For me, it was like, every little bit of context that I had to throw away, it's like killing your darlings. I took it personally. It offended me that I had to throw that thing away. I think that's probably my biggest weakness. How do you think about trying to remedy that weakness versus surrounding yourself with people who can augment it so that actually you can lean in to that weakness because that weakness is the inverse of your strength?

Currently, it's immersing myself in pop culture. And it's actually so funny, I'm trying to make a TV show. I'm trying to produce or have produced a TV show. And the kind of TV that I would make, the kind of show is what's called unscripted. So there's scripted shows that have writers and actors, and then there's unscripted. And unscripted mostly means reality TV. So currently, as we speak, my main topic of research, I never thought I would say this is reality television. Driving up here from Long Beach, I was listening to a podcast, Diving into the Behind the Scenes Story of Duck Dynasty. And I learned more about Duck Dynasty...

Oh my goodness. But it's fascinating. In fact, I love entering new fields. I love that reality TV is possibly the creative medium that is most distant from my home base. It's furthest away. And therefore, I'm a novice and I have a lot to learn. One example with Duck Dynasty, get this, so they make a show. It's an unexpected hit. They sold over 1000 licenses for different products that were branded by Duck Dynasty, sleeping bags, baseball caps, shoes, decals on trucks. Think of over 1000 products that they got, that one idea, which is there's a family out there that has a Duck Dynasty, they translated that and sold it and made money a thousand different ways. Isn't that mind-blowing to you? Yeah. It's like Disney.

I just can't believe it. I haven't gone through that to the other side where I'm trying to double down on that bias that I have. I think I will get there. But I still haven't found a way to build a team that can reliably produce excellent creative content. I still have to be part of it. That's still something I'm working on. Why do you write an annual review every year?

How do you think about that process? The annual review is a huge part of my life. I find that deep introspection about the fundamentals of my values, who I am, what I want for my future is not good to do too often. I actually don't want to be constantly introspecting. I don't want to be constantly reconsidering the pillars and the foundation of my life. That's best to do at intervals, and I find the best interval is a year, for a number of reasons. I mean one is, it takes a lot of time. It takes months and many, many hours. It's almost destabilizing in a way. To go and to question your fundamental values is a little scary.

Also, the way we do it is we peer into our core, look at the things that we've gotten wrong. I mean, we ran an annual review workshop for multiple years together. And every year, there's something that I look at and it is a big old slice of humble pie. Yes. It's confronting, it's vulnerable, it's scary. Don't want to do that too often. And in fact, weirdly... This is very weird, but the reason I like a year is I almost like for my life to have drifted a little bit out of alignment with my values, a little bit. Not crazy. But if I revisit that kind of foundation too often it's almost like, yeah, I'll find little things that are kind of off track, but who really cares? I like for that misalignment to start drifting and then I start having real consequences, and then those consequences give me the motivation, the clarity, and the kind of reason to actually make some real changes. So I often sense it around

this time of year, September, October. Even right now, I can sense that there are ways in which I'm not aligned with myself. I'm spending my time in ways... I can't even tell you what they are. I just feel it. And starting around early December, mid-December, I'm really going to dive into trying to find what those are. What makes for a good annual review? A few things come to mind. Changing your environment, you have to change your environment.

You can't just sit at your same desk on your same computer, take the same kind of notes- Eating your same oatmeal. Yeah. Talk to the same people and expect to have this profound, new vision of your life. You have to go to new places. Even, I find, eat different food. I almost have to go into a meditative state. Eat lighter food, eat less, almost even do fasting, have less distractions, spend time with the people that are most important to me.

Time in nature, essential. I have to get into the almost monk-like, meditative state, and then those insights usually start coming up. Also, on the other end of that, willingness to... The goal of coming out of it is not just to have insights, it's to really change things. So willingness to really make some hard decisions. Say no to some things that you might've said yes to in the past. End relationships. Start relationships. Join communities. Leave communities. One reason I like doing my annual review in public and sharing in public is to create accountability. Because without that accountability, I am telling you... I would look at this list of next actions and be like, "No, thank you. I'm not about to upend my life like this." But since I've shared it already,

I'm forced to follow through with it. A lot of your advice to new writers is, don't worry about having your own ideas at the beginning, just be a curator. Why? Oh, gosh, because that's all you can do. You don't know anything at the beginning. No. You say through curation, you develop taste. The internet turns everybody into a curator. Savvy media consumers. And every savvy media consumer is a curator. They don't sit back and accept what's thrown at them.

Why do you have to curate? Because that's how you learn. That's your own education. You're in a sense curating for yourself. You are intentionally shaping and deciding your own consumption. By the time you've done that, you've done practically all the work to just share it as some sort of public resource, but in a sense, that's all we're ever doing. Picasso made these wildly unprecedented drawings. But you see for example in his faces that he was, in a sense curating African art. African art just shows up so powerfully and clearly in his drawings. I mean, we've talked about this, that nothing is truly new. Nothing is truly original. So you just go from more basic curation, just like, "Listen to these songs, look at these paintings, read these books," to more refined and almost hidden and subtle forms of curation.

It's been fun to watch you get really analytical about the book publishing industry with little

things like, you ran a regression analysis of what metrics correlate highest with book sales, and you found that it was number of new Amazon reviews per day that was the defining metric. Yes, yes. That's another frontier right now is... I've now done two books. I love publishing. I'm going to do it for the rest of my life. I hope to publish many more books, but then that means I should really understand it and really know what I'm doing and how the industry works, and so I'm just kind of studying it. But I think the most fascinating thing for me is no one has any idea what drives book sales. It's a big mystery. There's so little data, so little transparency. I'm talking traditionally published books. I thought the publishers would know, the agencies would know, the retailers, the wholesalers. No one knows. And so I just find it interesting that I can actually advance the field. I can make breakthroughs just by

sitting and looking stuff up on Amazon. What has surprised you about the book industry? Why have you chosen to go with traditional publisher? Yeah, this was a long journey. I self-published I think six or seven different books, eBooks myself, so I'm very familiar with that world. But I've decided for myself that... I'm not sure. I don't think I'll ever self-publish again. I think once you've crossed over, it's permanent.

And I think it mostly comes down to what I really think of as my mission these days, which is to reach the mainstream. I've decided that where I fit, my role, where I can add the most value is not in my niche, not in the PKM niche, the Silicon Valley niche, the intellectual, nerd niche. I will consume from there and I'll inhabit those spaces, but it's almost like the people that I care about, the specific people are the zero to one people, are the people who would not otherwise find out about an idea. Who I might very well be the one and maybe even the only one that can introduce them to a new concept, idea, framework, perspective. To me, that is a mission worth dedicating my career to. It really is meaningful to me.

Tell me about this idea of how the more casual mediums are easier for you to write in. Like Apple Notes is much easier than Evernote, which is easier than Scrivener or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's kind of, the medium is the message, which we usually think of in terms of consumption, but it's also true for the one sending the message. That's a great point. The context, the environment is everything. The little things. Is it analog or digital? Is it on paper or not? Even the kind of device. I'm constantly surprised by this, that even taking the same digital notes, in the same software application, let's say Evernote, I will have different thoughts and write down different notes on my phone versus my iPad versus my computer. How can you explain that?

If I had to explain it, I'd probably say it's all the little affordances. What's on the edge of the screen, the position that my body is in, or productive computer versus iPad versus phone in the hammock or whatever. It's the place that I'm in. It's what I was just doing before then on that same device. What I will do after then. All these little things make a huge difference.

Let's talk about building rite of passage. We had that weak in Mexico, and I think that one of the best things that we had working together and one of the worst things was we both had such good second brains that we could just do everything at the last minute. We never ever, ever planned in advance. And so I called you, it was November 2018 and I was like, "Hey, man, I'd love your help making an online course," and you were like, "All right, let's do it. That sounds great." We talked for seven minutes, I would say. Say yes.

Yeah, exactly. Just say yes. We talked for seven minutes and you were like, "All right, well, we'll go down in February. We'll go down to Mexico City," where you were living at the time. And I remember, for 11 grueling days... That's some of the hardest I ever worked. We would meet in the morning, what was that, [inaudible 00:58:26], that coffee shop? Yes. Yeah. It was like the Mexico City Starbucks. That place was awesome. We'd go to it, and you had that giant folder and you would basically interview me, and then we would write down all the ideas. And thank God because I couldn't have done this.

What you would do is you would take all the ideas and you organized all of them into seven modules, and then we would film in the afternoon. And then here's where manufacturing and feedback helped. Remember we had that team of people who would give us feedback. So we would record from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM, 7:00 PM and then we would upload it, export it, and then we'd have a team overnight that would give us feedback so the next day we would wake up with a round of feedback, and that's cycle times for manufacturing. Exactly, exactly. It was insane, but we couldn't have done it a different way. Not only would it have been slower, the end result would've been way worse without that intensity, that speed, that really fast cycle time. But the most productive days of our lives also. The whole seed of your company was created in days.

Literally. It's incredible. Do you feel like it's impossible to have that intensity with a kid? Kind of, and it's not really needed. I actually find this to be one of the main things that's changing over the course of my life and my career is, intensity is no longer the end all be all anymore. I can create more value, I can have more leverage, I can make a bigger impact. Sometimes with a conversation, such as with a team. The obvious example is if I unblock the team. We have a call, everyone's there and I make a decision or set a vision or remove a constraint or add a constraint. It can have a much, much bigger impact than days of my personal intensity. Also, the side effects of that intensity are much worse. Because it's not just the day or the days that you spend there. You then have a recovery period. And when I come home and have that recovery and I'm not present with the kids and I see that... I don't know. There's a lot bigger consequences now

with kids, such that I'm not really optimizing for that anymore, and kind of happy with it. What is your writing process like now? Mostly mornings. That's another thing that's changed. I can really only write just from a physiological level for about two hours. It's like a specific two hours. It's from 9 to 11 A.M. on a weekday. I can't wake up early like I used to and spend the wee hours of the morning writing intensively. Later in the day, forget it. I don't know if that's just aging or what, but I have a very specific window, which in a sense makes it easier. I just cannot schedule anything at that time. No meetings.

I either need Lauren to watch the kids or have a babysitter. In contrast to what I just said, that intensity is not important, for those two hours, it is the most important, and I just have to protect them so aggressively. The thing about your career that I think is so fun and almost funny is that you were building this career and your parents were like, "What?" Your parents are not super techie. And the best anecdote here is that you would send a newsletter every single week and your mom thought that it was a personal email that you would write to her. She thought that you would just sit down every week and you'd be like, "Hey mom, this is what's going on." She didn't realize that you were broadcasting that to tens of thousands of people every time.

I would start each one with "Hi, folks." So she thought it was her and my dad. All right, Tiago, thanks for coming on the show. Absolutely. It was such a pleasure.